This is totally doable, and if someone asked for it for Appointment Reminder, it would turn a $30 a month account into a $5,000 a month account by itself. If you honestly care about audit trails, welcome to enterprise pricing and hope you enjoy your stay.
"This is not hard to do."<p>That's a big assumption. I've worked with systems that wouldn't have been able to provide this without a LOT of work and upgrades, and they weren't anywhere near the size if Google and Amazon.
It would be nice to some more of this.<p>For Google Apps (for Business, Education, and ISPs), information on logins (both successful and failed) and logouts is already available to the domain administrator: <a href="http://code.google.com/googleapps/domain/audit/docs/1.0/audit_developers_guide_protocol.html#downloading_account_information" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/googleapps/domain/audit/docs/1.0/audi...</a><p>For personal accounts, you have access to SOME of this data: select "Details" next to the account activity information in the footer of Gmail's web interface.
Almost 10 years ago I worked for a digital imaging company called ACD Systems and we had a major product launch of ACDSee. We were using Akamai as a CDN and we wanted to know the stats about who was downloading.<p>Think about this for a second.. Akamai is massive with 10,000+ global servers handling massive amounts of traffic. It might sound simple to fetch one users logs but how do you make this simple for the user. Akamai also had a proprietary log format. To their credit we had a couple conference calls and we worked with their engineers to find a solution. They were a great company.<p>You don't see logs being offered because it is a major pain in the ass to compile these logs from many servers and reduce them for a specific user.
You can get at <i>some</i> of that information for gmail. See <a href="http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=gmail&answer=45938" rel="nofollow">http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=gmail&a...</a> for details.
Heroku does this - they have a nice console interface for pulling down the logs from your deployed app. Granted, it is not quite the same as Gmail, but it's always a start.<p>Maybe it's a business idea: email for geeks. I'd use it. :)
Yes, we could give you the logs,.. but if we have a multiple tenants in one machine, then the logs are going to show those users activity as well... This is a little trickier than made out to be.. Still doable, but some of the companies/products mentioned, (i.e. Salesforce) have customers on there that wouldn't want you seeing they're activity. You could begin to draw assumptions about some salesforce customer you share a machine with by looking at their log activity. That company would then not be very happy with salseforce...
I don't agree with the articles assumptions on the immense usefulness of this. Services where it makes sense disseminates the info anyway. Amazon sends me e-mails when I buy something. Other sites have RSS feeds of activity.<p>Why would I want to run intrusion detection on cloud based services? Isn't that why you put it in the cloud?